Her Victory (33 page)

He put smoked fish on to their plates, and observed her by glances, unwilling to embarrass by staring. With so much to look at, there was something to hope for, and a long time was necessary to take in what lay behind those angled, intriguing blue eyes. She laughed. ‘Do you think I should be starving because I tried to do something daft?'

‘I didn't really think, except that you can't have eaten since last night.'

She drank the wine. ‘You're right, though.' I don't want to get drunk in front of a stranger. ‘I'll give up my room and go back to Nottingham.' She had nothing to say, but the silence, even for a few seconds, alarmed her. ‘I've got to do
something
.'

He refilled both glasses. ‘If you're uncertain, don't. Whatever's going to happen will, without you interfering in the process. My experience suggests that it's just as likely to be good as bad. The time to do things is when they start doing them to you, and until then the only worthwhile course is to take your mind off what problems you have, by eating something, for example.'

He spoke unhurriedly, a slight pause now and again as if to let her know that at least he thought before opening his mouth, a mannerism which made him sound very right indeed, and also wise, since each phrase touched similar words in her mind. He lifted his glass. ‘Let's drink to a long life.'

She sipped.

Neither did he give her time to agree nor disagree with whatever he said. ‘In my job I learned that you could anticipate problems, but never create them. They came right enough – how they came, at times! – but it never did to brood about them.'

The room had a timelessness that only an unmarried man could create. The stove gurgled, and they were warm. The ticking of his special clock made it even more timeless. She was sincere, almost fearful. ‘I left my husband, and don't manage well on my own.'

To have shelter in a fair haven, provisions and clothes, was certainly a start. ‘Do you have any money?'

‘Enough to be going on with. But is that everything?'

He put food on her plate. ‘Perhaps not. I've always lived by myself, but I suppose it's difficult if you never have.'

‘It might not even be that,' she said.

What the hell is it, then? ‘You have to ride a storm day after day, sometimes for a week or more. In life it can last months, but eventually it goes.'

‘Oh yes,' she said, ‘
everything
goes.' He didn't understand, though his words were true enough, and comforting. It was all right for a man. The depths below her seemed immense, as if she still had a long way to fall. Beyond the room there was an emptiness which she couldn't bear to think about, and whatever lurked out there wanted to annihilate her hopes and expectations.

He touched her hand. ‘Nobody understands anybody, but if you can look and listen and talk, and even laugh, then a glimmer of a solution might come through the mist. The only person I ever understood was my aunt, and I had little enough information to go on. In everybody's life there can't be more than one or two people they'll ever understand, or be understood by. More than that is too much to wish for.'

She felt numb. ‘I suppose so.' She hoped he was wrong. She had come from a land of big families, and couldn't live like that.

‘The only reason for staying alive is so that sooner or later you'll understand
one
person. Those who try to kill themselves do so only because they have given up hope of trying to understand one person in their lives. Or they don't know anyone who wants to try and understand them. They may have tried, and think they've failed, and don't have the heart to make another attempt. There are lots of duties in life that you've got to look sharp about. The only thing I was brought up on was duty, and I don't regret it now. It often saved me from despair, and stopped me doing much harm to others. Or so I like to think.'

She nodded, content to listen, and wondered why he was trying to send her back to George.

‘But the main duty, bigger than all the others, is to go on living even when you can't bear the thought of facing the world a minute longer. When you feel that way, just grit your teeth and live it out till the threat goes. It's the one duty that matters. If you survive that, whatever else you want will come.'

He only ever spoke in such a way to himself, and feared he was being pompous, but words were taken from his control, and though he didn't like it, neither did he regret it when he saw how she seemed absorbed by what he was saying. When the heart gave out its own words in the form of advice for someone else, that advice could also be meant, he knew, for oneself.

‘Put your decisions off for a while.' He was glad Judy wasn't at their lunch to accuse him of self-interest. ‘And get out of London for a day or two.'

‘You don't need to be anxious about me.' She hadn't left George's prison to walk blindfold into another. ‘I'll be happy enough living on my own when I know what I'm going to do, and what I'm not going to do.'

He once met a second mate who, he told her, being dead drunk, related that when at home with his wife he always peeled her fruit. He called for a plate of Jaffas to demonstrate, and Tom observed that stripping an orange of its skin was like taking a globe of the world to pieces: cutting off the two poles, scoring with great precision along the meridians of longitude about sixty degrees apart, then pulling each segment off intact, much like an instructor at a navigation class demonstrating a theory of map projections. At the third orange the second mate fell on to the floor and had to be carried back to his ship, smelling as much of citrus fruit as whisky. Even though dead drunk one could be precise, though it was wise not to push the
spirit
too far.

She smiled, and watched his fingers dextrously working as he peeled her an orange in the same neat way. ‘You spoil me.'

‘You're my guest.' Responsibility for any other person but himself had been shunned, unless within the hierarchy of a crew. His relationship with Clara had been possible because she had been equally responsible for him. Half a packet of coffee went into the pot, and he stood while the grounds settled. It was a day for staying awake. One must never ask questions, but he'd got her back from the dark, and his curiosity was intense.

‘I'll wash up, at least.' She smiled, and thought he probably had a pinafore hidden in the cupboard.

‘We once had a steward,' he said, ‘who threw the dishes overboard after meals. By the time we discovered it, we were eating off bare boards and old newspapers. He was flown home in a strait-jacket, poor chap.'

He put a tick against the question as to whether she would laugh. Its sound came as the first real sign of life. ‘An aunt of mine died,' he said, ‘who left me a flat in Brighton, and I'll be going there in a day or two. I haven't yet sifted through the stuff she left.' He came back to the table. From previously thinking he had nothing to lose by certain proposals, he felt that care was needed because something more was at stake. ‘I was brought up as an orphan, so I might find out a few things about my past.'

The food and wine made her drowsy. ‘Don't you know enough already?'

‘Sufficient to breathe on, I suppose. But who knows everything? There's a lot more somewhere. Wouldn't you think there is?'

‘There might be – I daresay.'

‘I never asked my aunt direct questions, thinking that any information would come to me in its own good time. I suppose I could have, but now it's too late. For some reason I didn't have the burning curiosity about myself until now, nor to get through to anything even deeper than information, if you see what I mean.'

‘I think I do.'

He felt as if he had never spoken what was truly in his mind. ‘Young kids these days take drugs to blast a hole in the wall that they think keeps them from knowing themselves. Either it doesn't work, or there's nothing to know, and so they find they've turned into zombies when the smoke of the explosion's drifted away. You can't get through to something that you are not, or even into something that you might wish you were. I prefer to know myself in my own good time, at the rate my mind was born to move at. Maybe there's nothing there, but if not then at least I won't get brain damage trying to find out.'

She sipped her bitter coffee, thinking how lucky he was to be able to talk so easily.

‘There are other ways than by drugs.'

Perhaps he spoke like that because he'd spent years talking to himself. ‘I'm sure.'

He lit his pipe. ‘I know so. I've tried a few. But often the sea drained every possibility of personal speculation, except that concerning the existence of God. I don't feel embarrassed saying that, because it's a question which on still waters has no answer, and seems all too obvious during storms. One watch follows another, and such speculations soon lose any relevance they had on taking departure. Days drift by. A storm is one day, however long it goes on, and a calm sea likewise. Every minute is occupied by a routine of vigilance, even if it only means staring at a plate-glass ocean. Life is a drill, slow-motion sometimes, often too hectic for good health, but at least you don't forget anything, or let yourself in for too many systematic, constant, random or probable errors, or fall into a dreadful blunder on getting too near land that sends you to the bottom like concrete. But on shore everything's different, a matter of learning to live so that you don't seem like a ghost to everybody as you walk the streets, and so that you don't feel one to yourself. I don't need shock or drugs to get me to a new state of being, as I read in the colour-supplement magazines that people often do. I have to get accustomed to normal land-locked life, and it's like being born again, which I suppose is enough of a shock.'

Her face was encased in her long slim hands. She had not replaced her wedding ring. He was talking for a purpose. She wanted him to continue.

‘I was going to ask,' he said, ‘if you've got time to spare, whether you'd like to travel down to Brighton with me. I like to look at the sea now and again, that cemetery of old friends, not to mention myself.'

He was surprised not to feel embarrassment at such disembowelling of the spirit. Sailors' tales with mates or girlfriends had been different, and reflections like these had been kept secret in either fair or foul weather. ‘You can go your own way in Brighton, or come to the flat and I'll show you around the old place. It'll be a change for you, and a pleasure for me to have company.'

She wanted to say yes. His offer was too important to refuse, being the only one she'd had. Can I let you know later? I'm not sure how I feel. She didn't speak, but vaguely nodded. To judge by his smile she had accepted. She was too exhausted not to. She needed freedom and ease, to sleep, but not to die any more because she wanted to know who he was. Coloured sparks were spinning in the space where her thoughts were losing themselves. No one had graced her with this kind of talk before.

6

In the dark, at five in the afternoon, she put on the light and got out of bed. Endless time was before her, but why didn't her thoughts stop racing? She drew the curtains, and dressed. The room was cold, so she lit the gas. She listened for movement from next door. He had gone out. She pressed three teabags in boiling water to make a strong drink.

Every move is deeper into a prison when you are on your own. There is no place more secure than that of yourself, which those who are alone go further into at every step. She knew it, but was unable to make amends.

The rain had stopped, but it was cold and raw. She passed a lit-up police station and turned towards the Underground. The rush hour was coming out, pushing up the steps. Traffic was stalled at the lights. An old man clutching a plastic bag searched a dustbin.

She got rid of some tenpenny pieces in the ticket machine. Few people went down, but the up-escalator was packed. She wanted to walk in lighted places. She craved to be in the dark, on her own. She needed both conditions, and was glad to be alive.

She liked being wherever she was. A train came quickly. Stops flashed by. She missed Oxford Circus, got out at Tottenham Court Road, followed crowds into the fume-laden air, looked at faces behind the glass of Wimpys, Hamburgers, Golden Eggs and Grills.

The window of a sex shop was veiled. She saw books, tapes, films, vibrators, condoms, flimsy underwear that probably melted when you washed it, rubber suits and rubber dollies that perished after whatever was done to them, and contraptions whose uses she didn't try to fathom. The men and few women had perhaps come in out of curiosity like her. There were young people, and the smart middle-aged with brief-cases. Film shows took place behind a curtain. Relaxed and unconcerned, people inspected goods on offer, read labels and sets of instructions, and bored young women at the cash desk checked items out like food at a supermarket.

A man gripped her elbow. ‘Will you come with me?'

She snapped her arm clear. There was no fuss. Would she have gone with him if it had been Tom? The answer was no, but he wouldn't have done such a thing. But if he did? Don't think. Don't think.

She looked along more shelves and tables of the sexual-fun market that promised the unattainable. A tourist or passer-by was born every minute to fall for such unkept promises, moneyed customers who bought some mechanical spirit-killer to use in making love, goods to be put in Christmas stockings or to litter desert tents. Love is the last thing it can be called.

The district was a garish beast glutted on all that was false. People come to London and go home clutching some sexual gewgaw as they had once taken a stick of rock and a funny hat from the seaside. Whether they walked out with something in their mac pockets, or stuffed into pigskin briefcases, they had more money than was needed for life's necessities. Goods had to be provided in exchange for floating cash, for they couldn't be expected to
throw
their money into the gutter or keep it in the bank, though she supposed that most of the stuff ended in dustbins that tramps rummaged through looking for something to keep them alive.